A gritty exploration in five stories of India and a number of poverty-stricken individuals. Harsh and often distressing (I'd have been looking through my fingers if it was on the TV!), Mukherjee's evocative style and descriptive narrative brings the settings to life. A gripping and clever read, as the stories gradually link together.

A wonderful use of words, written in a flowing, descriptive style which instantly transports the reader into the sights, sounds and smells within. A beautiful book, contemporary yet reminiscent of an old classic

I was sent a copy of A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee to read and review by NetGalley.
I honestly have to say I did not enjoy this book. I read it to the end both because I do not like to abandon a book that is well written and also because I had requested to review it. I have total respect for the eloquence of the writing and the way that the author conjures up the imagery to the stories, however, it is the nature of this imagery that makes me dislike the novel.
For me it is all too harrowing and sad. I applaud the reality that the stories bring, forcing you to become aware of a totally different culture that is so very devastating, heartbreaking and unfair – especially to women. But there being nothing within the novel that is redeeming and uplifting, even fleetingly, I cannot agree with reviews stating that it is compassionate, beautiful and full of heart.
There are other authors, such as Rohinton Mistry, who have explicitly tackled the very troublesome issues surrounding the poor of India but generally with a softening degree of hope and even happiness mixed in.
I have given the book 3 stars, not because I liked the content but because I thought the writing was accomplished. I wouldn’t however recommend this book unless the reader is prepared to be left saddened and indeed ashamed of the human race.

This is an inciteful novel around five different stories which highlight the disgraceful abuse and poverty of the Indian caste system. The characters depicted here are,of course,at the bottom layer. It is well written but emotionally challenging. It is hard for other countries to believe this still happens in a country which is rich for some. The author is to be congratulated for the sympathetic but realistic approach to these issues.

I found this book very hard going emotionally, 5 stories in total, each characters story different with a common theme of poverty within each tale. Each tale takes you through a whole range of different emotions. Overall this book is breathtakingly raw, beautiful, and devastatingly tragic. it’s so clear to see how Mukherjee received the man booker prize for this outstanding novel. I have awarded 4 stars as I didn’t always find the story easy to follow, some parts seems disjointed and a little unfinished.

This is not the book I expected when I sat down to read it but it’s one I felt very emotional about. It’s actually a series of fives stories interconnected in many ways but also open to being read as separate vignettes of observations.

They’re also stories about how someone can feel at home in one place or not, how they feel when moving from one place to another, their sense of belonging. The characters are all living their lives in various places across India and each place is put under a microscope - village, hamlet, city, every place and the person’s place in it is scrutinised. Where does each of them belong?

The story about the bear was very hard to read given the importance of animal welfare now. A man returning to his homeland with his child and feeling ashamed of what his home is like now. A girl forced to leave the only home she’s known but then finding her own place to belong.

This is a sad and heartbreaking account of a country and its people. Class, poverty, rituals, family, independence and freedom...

It did feel disjointed at times. But then maybe, given its subject, is the point.

This interview gives an excellent perspective on some of Mukherjee’s inspirations:

https://www.thenational.ae/2.1975/acclaimed-author-neel-mukherjee-on-india-and-his-new-book-a-state-of-freedom-1.412056

The book, both in title, structure and content is inspired by VS Naipaul’s “In a Free State”

"It is a wonderfully formally audacious book. He has three novellas bookended by a prologue and epilogue, and not a single of those narratives join in any kind of obvious way, and yet it is a novel. I found myself asking, Why is it a novel? It returns very interesting answers"

In this book, the prologue is a poorly written story about a professor returning to India with his American born son, riddled with cliches – on only the second page, the two pass by a series of signboards including “100% VAGETARIAN” and as they pass a Coca-Cola sign, the boy is “able to read that trademark universal wave even though he couldn’t read the language”.

The story does however set up later sections, the father witnesses a labourer falling to his death, as they wait in a car a beggar and a bear appear beside the car, the beggar with a fox-like face like a ghostly tour guide that the father has seen previously. The idea of opening with a ghost story is a deliberate one:

"I was thinking carefully about what a ghost story does. A ghost exists always because something unhappy in the past has not been settled. I thought the perhaps the ghost story could be opened up to think about painful histories and unsettled history"

The second part of the book is around another non-resident Indian – this time a young London-based designer and his annual visits to his family home, where he interacts with two servants – the cook Renu, and another servant Milly: his Western values clash with the more traditional views of his upbringing in his relations with them. My primary school daughters were telling me, when writing a story recently, that their teacher is always urging them to “show not tell” when writing a story – but Mukherjee fails to follow this edict, with the character explaining:

“A deep seated, almost hard wired, cultural training injected outrage into my system at the fact of a servant answering back. But no sooner had it manifested than the over-riding educated-liberal reaction to the retrogressive nature of that first response pushed it down”

After these initial weaknesses though, the book becomes much stronger and explores the “painful histories and unsettled stories” opened up by the ghost story. In the remainder of the second section, the son decides to visit Renu’s home village, only to realise the almost insurmountable cultural barriers between him and the life of her relatives – and also having to confront the fact that what he sees as a positive story (Renu using her savings to pay for her nephew to attend a top university abroad) has a clear downside (it is at the expense of her own daughter’s education and upbringing). The third section gives us the back story of the man and his bear – with the cruelness he and many others exhibit to the bear both standing as a wider metaphor for inequality in India (but here now with Mukherjee in show mode) and as a direct reference to (the lack of) animal rights in India. The fourth section is Milly’s back story but interleaved with the story of her childhood friend Soni – while Milly sees her escape from poverty as acting as a servant in big Cities (with mixed results – one of her placements effectively ending up as captivity, but with her eventually meeting her husband), her friend becomes a Naxalite guerilla. The fifth section is a brief stream of consciousness from the construction worker (who we realise is the brother of the bear handler) before his death.

Despite the links between the sections, there is a clear lack of resolution to the stories (for example a key mystery in the first story is the open animosity of Renu towards Milly, and while this is acknowledged in Renu’s story it is not explained) and the final tale of the construction worker has no real resolutions or reveals to the other stories. Similarly although there are potential cameo appearances of the scientist in the second, third and fourth sections, none are clear.

This again seems a deliberate stylistic device, with the author commenting:

"There are people who have written very cohesive books with fractured narratives. David Mitchell comes to mind. Cloud Atlas, I think, is so wonderful in what he does with structure and tectonics. You will see everything join up in very unexpected ways. I wanted to write in a very non-David Mitchell kind of way. I thought a properly realistic novel would mean that things don’t join up. One ramification of the word ‘freedom’ is chaos. Things don’t cohere and they spin apart"

Instead of tying everything up, A State of Freedom ends with fraying and chaos. That is a realistically Indian novel I feel. The whole Indian state that held together, miraculously, for the last 70 years since independence is fracturing

Overall this is a mixed novel – I found it difficult to forget the sheer clunkiness of the opening pages, but also enjoyed the way in which the novel explored modern India and the divides between castes, classes, religions, animals, gender (especially in terms of education), residents and returning non-residents, generations, regions. A key theme of the book also is transitions and attempts to move across those divides. And while there is much bleakness to the writing there is also life and vibrancy – particularly in the detailed descriptions of cuisine in the second and fourth sections and Milly’s story in particular ends on a positive note:

"Something Soni says appeared, like a light she didn’t know existed aorund a corner. “Your life is in bits and pieces – a little bit here, a little bit there. One year in Dumri, another year somewhere else, then another year somewhere else again”. Milly disagrees, silently, voiceferously. Her life is not fragmented. To her it has unity and coherence. She gives it thoese qualities. How can movement from one place to another break you? Are you a terracota doll broken in transit."